Nevada gets F grade in 2015 State Integrity Investigation

Gambling with voters' trust in the Silver State

16 hours, 21 minutes agoUpdated: 16 hours, 16 minutes ago

It
seemed like a simple rule: don't get involved in a political campaign
while serving on Nevada's Ethics Commission.

After all, legislators
created the commission as the main safeguard against misconduct by
candidates and elected officials. To run for office while policing
others would seem to be a clear conflict of interest.

But in 2014, no fewer than three of the commission's decision-makers
decided to do just that, seemingly flouting the law and raising the
question: who watches the watchdogs?

The controversy left many political observers in the state dismayed,
but not necessarily surprised.

While the population has skyrocketed and become more diverse in
recent decades, politics here continue to reflect the state's Wild West
roots, with a strong libertarian streak and a part-time legislature that
meets for just a few months every two years.

Key decisions about everything from budgets to pension oversight are
made in unannounced, late-night meetings of legislators or by citizen
board members and commissioners who earn only token pay and face little
accountability.

The Silver State has made strides in putting government records
online, and passed strong laws protecting whistleblowers and cracking
down on lobbyists' wining and dining of lawmakers.

But with a lax
attitude toward verifying information provided by candidates and elected
officials, a crippled ethics enforcement system and a legislature that
basically polices itself, Nevada earns a score of 57, or F, in the State Integrity Investigation, placing it 46th among the 50 states.

The investigation is a data-driven assessment of state government
accountability and transparency by the Center for Public Integrity and
Global Integrity.

Big business, small-time LegislatureNevada's Legislature governs a state with a $120 billion economy that
includes the epicenters of the country's gaming and gold-mining
industries and one of its most-visited tourist destinations.

Yet
lawmakers are not subject to the same open meetings law that applies to
local school boards and city councils.

With all of the state's business crammed into one biennial spring
session, the pace of decision-making can become frenetic as deadlines
approach.

Budget decisions between sessions are made with
little fanfare by a small group of legislators.

"It's almost impossible to think about, with a part-time citizen
legislature … how you could possibly get a good grade in managing the
budget," said David Byerman, former secretary of the state Senate.

The legislature employs an auditor to
dig into the finances of the executive and judicial branches, who has
ferreted out safety problems at the state's juvenile detention centers
and investigated long-hauling of tourists by state-regulated taxi
drivers.

But no one audits the legislature itself.And while Nevada recently banned all gifts to lawmakers from the
state's powerful lobbyists, those lobbyists still aren't required to
report on their activities between sessions.

The disclosures they do
file aren't checked for accuracy, just one detail that helped earn the
state a ranking of dead last in the category of lobbying oversight.

Nevadans value the freedom they enjoy under a limited government.
There's no state income tax. You can buy medical marijuana in Las Vegas
and canoodle with a prostitute in Pahrump.

But transparency advocates argue it's possible to retain much of that
freedom while modernizing a legislature they describe as a relic of an
earlier time.

"It's all the small Western states that have low population levels
that have not been able to move from the 19th century into the 21st
century," said Sondra Cosgrove,
president of the League of Women Voters of Las Vegas Valley and a
history professor at the College of Southern Nevada.

"It benefits the
people who actually run this state, the gaming industry and some of the
political players, to have a part-time legislature and not have things
work, because then they can control everything."

Under the radar

When Gary Lambert applied for a grant for his nonprofit, Nevada Trail
Stewards, from the state's Commission on Off-Highway Vehicles in 2014,
he might have thought it was a lock — Lambert was also the commission's
vice-chair. But when he argued in favor of the application to his fellow
commissioners, he did so without fully disclosing his relationship to
the nonprofit, a violation of state ethics laws, according to a
complaint filed with the Ethics Commission.

Lambert admitted to
the violation and agreed to take state-provided ethics training,
commission records show.

Lambert couldn't be reached for comment. But
current Nevada Trail Stewards chairman Scott Gerz said other
commissioners were already aware of Lambert's interest in the nonprofit,
and that he wasn't the only one to push for a pet project.

The commission has since updated its grant-making rules.

But it's
impossible to tell how many similar cases are out there, because Nevada
does not require members of most of the state's dozens of boards and
commissions to disclose their financial ties.

The Ethics Commission, which is responsible for monitoring these
public servants, struggles with limited resources in addition to its own
ethical problems.

While former Executive Director Caren
Cafferata-Jenkins resigned after her judicial campaign drew scrutiny
last year, two commissioners who ran for office in apparent violation of
state law continue to hold their seats.

One of them is John Carpenter, a former rancher who ran for the Elko
County Commission, who said he didn't see any conflict of interest —
even though state law says ethics commissioners may not "be actively
involved in the work of any political party or political campaign."

"If I had got elected then I would've resigned immediately,"
Carpenter said. "The ethics commission is sort of a stand-alone
commission and I don't think they are involved in politics like some
other parts of government are.

And I told people from the ethics
commission that I was going to run for county commissioner and nobody
said, 'You should not do this.' "

The Ethics Commission has only one investigator, and the commission's own 2014 annual report said current law makes it "nearly impossible" for it to cite offenders with the kind of willful violations that lead to fines.

"The Commission sees our mission first and foremost as education,"
said Executive Director Yvonne Nevarez-Goodson. "It's not our goal to be
prosecutors and go out there and catch wrongdoing."

No-Bid Contracts

Decades may have passed since mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer
Lansky built casinos up and down the Las Vegas Strip, but these days
it's corporations that are making the state of Nevada an offer it can't
refuse.

From administering healthcare programs to updating computer systems,
companies won $1.7 billion in no-bid contracts with Nevada from 2011 to
2015, according to a Las Vegas Sun investigation.

That's 27 percent of the total contracts the state awarded — thanks to
legal loopholes that allow officials to bypass the state's normal
competitive bidding process.

In November 2013, Nevada's
Department of Health and Human Services signed a $130 million contract
with McKesson Health Solutions to create a care management system for
Medicaid recipients.

The decision came a week after the company's parent
corporation, McKesson Corp., had agreed to pay the state of Wisconsin
$14 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it had fraudulently
inflated prescription drug costs.

Xerox Corp. lost its contract to manage the state's health care
exchange website in May 2014, after the site was found to contain
hundreds of glitches. Yet the company continued to receive state
contracts, including a $7.8 million deal to audit unclaimed property.

"Especially if [a company] has long-standing ties to the state, one
complete screw-up doesn't negate them getting another [contract]," said Kyle Roerink, the Sun reporter who covered the no-bid deals.

Political candidates are now required to file their campaign finance
reports online.

A new cooling-off period, imposed by the Legislature in
2015, will slow the revolving door of former lawmakers returning as
lobbyists.

Nevada ranks in the top half of states for executive accountability
and the state budget process.

Citizens can access an easy-to-navigate website that provides budget information down to the line-item level.Technology has driven many of the improvements, with social media
giving more Nevada residents an inside look at what goes on in the
state's capital, Carson City, while the secretary of state's searchable
campaign finance record database makes journalists' work easier.

Further progress, however, may depend on Nevadans' willingness to mobilize and demand more information about their government.

"This state is a good-old-boy network," said Michael Green, an associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and political columnist for Vegas Seven magazine.

"They're going to be as transparent as they have to be, but not more transparent than they need to."

We
are standing for Nevada National office our third and final time,
putting it all on the line when most do not care or dare to turn off the
TV.

Congress,
the Courts and Executive Branch of government so far failed to reign in
destructive deficit spending that created $164 Trillion of mostly unfunded debt
liabilities that dwarf revenues by 55 times in a contracting $18
Trillion dollar economy, with a recent $3 Trillion government healthcare
tax revenue windfall not likely to be repeated:http://bit.ly/Jbd159

Another
way to look at this is if Washington, DC decided to freeze spending and
our real economy did not continue to contract, it might still take 55
years to pay, retire and service burgeoning debt.

If interest
rates recover to restore real markets, an unlikely current prospect,
each additional percentage point multiplied times $164 Trillion Treasury
debt, adds an unplayable $1.64 trillion to a $3.7 Trillion Federal
Budget.

This is a 44% budget increase in a time of economic
contraction that can cripple out and crowd out business, jobs and our
economic prosperity.

This could create a downward economic
governance spiral like that faced by one of the greatest American
economists from 1929 to 1934, when he changed his outlook from permanent
prosperity to debt default deflation as far as they eye could see:

http://bit.ly/1iwIiBf

http://bit.ly/1M5WPwa

One of these days Alice ~ Ralph Cramden, The Honeymooners

XXV. Real Life Political Solutions

Our three long-term political governance simple solutions are:

A)
Freeze government red tape, real spending and waste for seven years
like Reagan, Grace, Clinton, Gingrich, Joseph and the Pharaoh did during
seven tough years:http://1.usa.gov/1Wqgi52

C) Encourage seven years
of saving during the resultant times of plenty to be the first
administration since Andrew Jackson in 1834 to retire all but $33,733 of
public debt. We will use prosperity to liberate Americans from
government dependence and debts into greater equity and responsible
freedom for all:

http://1.usa.gov/1NjNBRu

The alternative is utter economic failure leading to the collapse of our government.

For this to happen, we will elect principled Independent Constitutional
Candidates of character, unbeholden to special interest lobbyist funding or
owned by billionaires.

Share with family, friends, neighbours now for winning results.

Let's stop watching TV and
get going now before it is too late.

We pray these posts inspire you to Circulate, Donate, Get Out, Register, Talk to Our
Neighbour, Volunteer
and Vote Silver Senator 2016 for True Constitutional Government, of the people,
by the people and for the people.

To register non-partisan:http://nvsos.gov/index.aspx?page=703

Otherwise it's more politics as usual.

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